User talk:JohnBeckett
If you add a comment here, I will be notified by email. You might like to add ~~~~ to insert your name and the date. JohnBeckett 11:36, 11 June 2007 (UTC) Archives: [[/Archive1|'1']] Tip 80 Thanks for your valuable contribution to Tip 80: Restore cursor to file position in previous editing session. I have removed both of our names from the "comments" section of that article per the comment guidelines. Although the "imported tip" notice says to avoid the article's talk page, at some point in the cleanup the talk page should start being used and perhaps now is the time. Comments directed at individual editors should be placed on their talk pages. (If you decide to start the talk page for that article, please send me a note on my talk page.) Thanks. -- Danorton (talk) 13:04, 28 July 2008 (UTC) :Of course you're absolutely correct about how wikis should run in general. I don't know if you've been watching progress here, but those of us who saw the import of the tips from vim.org, and then the immense amount of work to get the tips into some sort of shape, have formed the opinion that we still need to be different here. :To get an idea of what's happened, you could browse the list of 578 tips that we renamed. Apart from silly names, every title with a dodgy character like 'ended up here with 'OPENBRACKET' in the name. In the tips themselves, every ampersand was '__AT__' (to obfuscate the many email addresses from the more innocent days when the tips were started on vim.org). There are a lot of ampersands in Vim tips! Then there are the tips -- many of which are entirely broken or misguided or obsolete. :Anyway, we argued for a month about the talk pages, but the people who stayed on to do the work all agreed to avoid the talk pages for tips. We've recently had [[Talk:Working_with_CSV_files|our first and only example] where using such a talk page is actually helpful. I'll ramble on about this some more if you want to hear my reasoning, but in brief, it's simply that we want to work on one page rather than two, and we don't have any comments that are worth keeping, other than the ones we want visible on the tip page. I will definitely be revisiting VimTip80 and removing the comment I made. :It's great to have a contributor with wiki experience and who reads our guidelines! Thanks also for politely calling my contribution on tip 80 "valuable" -- perhaps an exaggeration, although I hope to return with something helpful. --JohnBeckett 00:06, 29 July 2008 (UTC) Easy_Buffer_Switching_Without_a_Plugin Thanks for moving the remaining info in this tip to VimTip1182. You've saved me quite a bit of searching through the tips, as I would have been to annoyed by this tip to leave it alone ;-) -- BenArmston 13:20, 11 August 2008 (UTC) :Thank you -- glad to help clear out one more unwanted tip! It's easier to find stuff when you have a local copy of the wikitext of each tip. One day I might put a zip of that somewhere. --JohnBeckett 22:15, 11 August 2008 (UTC) Adding links to removed tips I recently came across a link to Tip 329 . This tip has been removed from the Wiki. But there is no information why it was removed or what can be done instead. I guess that's also the case for other removed tips. If tips are removed shouldn't they get links to tips that supersede them or at least some information on why they are removed? I found http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Exchanging_adjacent_words which seems similar to the removed tip. Can I add a link to the removed tip? Dennis Benzinger 19:42, 4 September 2008 (UTC) :Thanks for reporting this Dennis. Exactly one year ago (on 4 Sep 2007), VimTip329 was merged to VimTip47. In those early days, I hadn't devised a system for handling merges, and there are another 75 removed tips that have no explanation (I've got a local copy of the files and, now you've pointed it out, I can easily grep them). Looking at it positively, there are 81 more recently removed tips that do have an explanation, for example VimTip5. These days (since about February, I think), all removed tips have some sort of brief explanation added. :I have just updated 329 to show that it was merged to 47. While I'd like to process the other 75, it's probably too much work. However, I might try to find any more broken links. For example, in VimTip1077 there is a link to 329 that should be changed to 47. :Perhaps VimTip47 and VimTip1539 ("Exchanging adjacent words") should have a "See also" to each other. Hmmm. In 1539, you can click the "Created" link at the top and see the discussion that occurred when the tip was accepted. In that discussion, I also said there should be a "See also"! --JohnBeckett 01:58, 5 September 2008 (UTC) ::Update: I had some tools that did the job: There were 28 links in 19 tips where the link was to a removed VimTipNumber page. I have fixed these. If you want to see them, consult 'Recent changes' and click 'Show bots'. --JohnBeckett 07:59, 5 September 2008 (UTC) Corrections welcome on tip 225 and title change? It's very pleasant to be welcomed that way, I don't know if it's the right way to answer you (I'm new on this kind of wiki). As I'm not a native english speaker, I'm grateful to any corrections. I also think it would be a good thing to change the title of tip 225 from: :Vim can interact with xdvi to :Vim can interact with xdvi or kdvi Regards, Corentin Corentin.barbu 09:10, 5 December 2008 (UTC) :I will reply on your talk page. --JohnBeckett 09:52, 5 December 2008 (UTC) Bug in help docs with index.txt I just discovered while editing Best_Vim_Tips#Easter_Eggs that any help links to index.txt will fail, because help.txt is converted to index.html in order to have it show up if just the directory is entered instead of the full path. I thought I'd let you know, since I'm not sure whom to contact about about it. --Fritzophrenic 14:55, 5 December 2008 (UTC) :Thanks -- this problem is in several tips. When Dan Sharp put the Vim 7.2 files on vimdoc, he had to run a program that I supplied which munges the help tags file to construct a tagsidx file which maps help keywords to the correct html file and anchor. It looks like Dan has used an old version of that program because the version from 2007-07-16 has a workaround for the problem you identify. :I will contact Dan and try to sort this out. Ironically, the help CGI script files for Vim 7.0 are still on vimplugin, and they include the correct tagsidx file. There are various workarounds I could do to patch the wiki to give a correct link (the correct page is vimindex.html, not index.html), but I don't think it's worthwhile. I imagine I'll be able to sort out with Dan how to fix the issue in a few days. --JohnBeckett 23:59, 5 December 2008 (UTC) ::I sent the correct file to Dan and he has installed it on vimdoc, so all the help links should work now. --JohnBeckett 22:27, 8 December 2008 (UTC) Remove or keep imported info in tip headers? Hi John! Is there a policy on keeping or removing imported info in tip headers? For example the author, version, complexity and created fields. Dennis Benzinger 17:27, 16 February 2009 (UTC) :Hi Dennis, Please keep the tip headers for now. If we ever decide to get rid of them, we can modify the tip template so that it displays nothing (or omits fields we don't want). Alternatively, I can use my bot to remove the header from each tip. :You might have noticed that I sometimes change the info in the imported tip header. Frankly, I would suggest others don't bother, but you're welcome to do what I do, if you like. If the created date is 2005 or before, I sometimes delete the month/day (one day I'll write a script to do that to all tips). I might adjust the complexity (but it's hardly worthwhile). I often change "version=5.x" to 6.0 or 7.0. I occasionally delete the author (displays nothing, see example) after checking that the author's original tip (from history) has been more or less replaced by subsequent edits/merges. If the tip introduced some clever angle, I'm inclined to keep the author to credit their work, but eventually we might just remove them all? See my further thoughts in another discussion. --JohnBeckett 22:23, 16 February 2009 (UTC) :: I'd keep the author names but rename the field to "Original Author" so that it's clear that this is not the only or the last author. --Dennis Benzinger 11:18, 17 February 2009 (UTC) :::I'll second the idea of changing that field's name to "original author" or similar. But, I think we should still omit the name when the original content has been entirely replaced. --Fritzophrenic 15:29, 17 February 2009 (UTC) :::: I'd even keep the original author in this case. I view this field as the first entry in the revision history of the tip. I think attribution is an important incentive for wiki authors. You don't delete the authors from the revision history if their edits get overwritten. --Dennis Benzinger 16:09, 17 February 2009 (UTC) I have done an edit to show how tip 6 would look if "original author" were used. On my system, if the browser window is 1075 pixels wide the header line of the previous tip 6 did not wrap. Now that it says "original author" it definitely wraps. Normally I would hate the wrapping of the header, but it might be regarded as a bonus because it helps to push the tip down, below the ad. Taking an idea from what Dennis said, I could have my bot do a dummy edit of every tip with edit summary "original author of tip was NAME". Then we could just remove the author and feel we weren't unduly ignoring them. It is a bit unfair how the authors of some tips are credited, despite the fact that the original tip was defective, and it's been fixed by wiki editors. What about new tips? I would be happy to omit the author from them because the edit history clearly shows the story. It could be argued that showing the new author is good to encourage people to post new tips, but I take the opposite view. We have over 1250 tips, and really don't need any more (particularly we don't need some of the very simple or duplicate new tips we've had in the last year), so I don't mind crediting authors only in the edit history. --JohnBeckett 05:40, 19 February 2009 (UTC) :I don't think the edit history will be enough, because quite often the submitter of a tip is a new or not-logged-in user and only their IP address shows in the edit history. If we really want to avoid wrapping in most cases, we could use "Creator" or "Submitter" or something instead of "Original Author". Although, I certainly wouldn't argue too much against removing the author altogether. This is a wiki, after all. I mostly like it for the tradition of it, but it seems to cause more trouble than it's worth. --Fritzophrenic 14:55, 19 February 2009 (UTC) ::It's not common that a new tip comes from an anon user (IP address), and they put their name in the tip. When that occurs, I could make it part of the "tip acceptance" procedure to put the author's name in the edit history. --JohnBeckett 20:27, 19 February 2009 (UTC) :I don't mind if the header wraps. For new tips I'd omit the author because it's in the history. And because I'd prefer that old and new tips look the same I like the idea of an automated edit which records the original author in the edit history and removes the field from the header. --Dennis Benzinger 15:56, 19 February 2009 (UTC)